"Don't inconvenience yourself for anyone"

...is not as convenient as it sounds

I have a 16ft storage POD containing approximately 3ft of stuff I actually need, stored 4K miles away in a country I haven’t lived in for almost 2 years. It’s not that challenging of a problem to solve. I just need to travel there, take the stuff I don’t need out, get rid of it, and have the remaining items shipped back to me. The difficulty is getting somewhere to put the POD while I do this. It needs to go on a driveway. I currently don’t have access to one.

In a conversation about this the other day, an acquaintance said that I can’t possibly be thinking of asking people if I could use their driveway. “It’s such an inconvenience!”. Is it, though? It will take 24 hours at most to have the POD delivered, emptied, and remaining contents transferred to the shipper. I had that POD outside my own house for a month, twice, and it was never in the way. “But it’s your fault you don’t have anywhere to unload it. You should have planned better! Figure it out yourself like everyone else does.”

That’s all true. It is entirely my fault that my stuff is in Indiana and I am in England. I chose to leave it there knowing I’d have to go back for it at some point. It is entirely my responsibility to figure out how to get it back.

But I don’t think that a problem being someone’s fault and responsibility means that it’s automatically unreasonable to ask another person to assist in solving it.

My acquaintance’s attitude represents the type moral judgment I see a lot on social media and in society in general at the moment. When a person expresses a need for something, the reaction isn’t often just “I can’t help”, but “You’re wrong to even ask.” It’s like we’re becoming allergic to inconvenience and seeing needing something as a personal failure.

Independence is great. I am an independent person and rarely need anything from anyone. What independence isn’t is complete self-containment at all costs. If you have the idea that the ideal person in our current society is one who needs nothing, asks for nothing, and never creates even the slightest friction for anyone else, when someone does need something from you, you’re already primed to think “Why are you putting this on me?”, regardless of what helping would actually involve. It’s the request that becomes the issue, not the substance of it. I saw a video on TikTok a while ago, someone ranting about their friend asking for a lift to the airport and framing it as this massive inconvenience and ridiculous ask as if we haven’t been driving each other to airports for decades. It was their fault they didn’t have transport, after all. Logistical problems get mixed up with moral failings and a simple request for a reasonable favor becomes an analysis of whose fault it is that the favor is needed.

People call this ‘boundaries’. An important concept for personal well-being that, in some cases, has lost all meaning. Many people are twisting this idea of protecting their limits into justification for complete non-involvement in other peoples’ challenges. Requests for help become ‘emotional labor’; dependency, no matter how situational or temporary, becomes ‘toxic’. As if everything is perfectly controllable and deviations from plans are evidence of personal failing.

Everyone knows that life is unpredictable and always has been. Community is so valuable because we can’t predict everything or plan our way out of everything. There’s a massive difference between taking responsibility for things not going to plan or doing something wrong and being essentially abandoned to manage the consequences alone. Older social norms, at least ones that I remember, had a more nuanced perspective, that “Yes, this is your problem to solve, and we will help you solve it”. Not “If it’s your problem, you must handle it entirely by yourself”.

It’s the attitude that’s the issue, not even necessarily the not helping aspect. Saying ‘no’ to a request that you don’t want to or can’t accommodate is fine. I’m not suggesting that we should all become people-pleasers and do whatever anyone asks of us for the sake of community. What I see the problem as is the reframing of the act of requesting help itself as unreasonable and the blame culture around asking. Almost like it’s a social pathology and it’s ‘safer’ to need nothing than risk being met with an overblown sense of resentment.

This doesn’t just show up in interpersonal relationships. Look at how society in general has gradually moved away from community help as a means of survival toward quite extreme individualism. There’s this sense that you’re smart and disciplined and responsible enough, you become immune to the unpredictability of the world and shouldn’t need anything; therefore, if you do, you’re not smart or disciplined or responsible enough, and that’s your fault, so you’re on your own. You did something wrong. You failed to plan. You failed to save. You failed to anticipate.

It’s a comfortable psychological perspective for those who are currently secure. To look at those who aren’t and feel a sense of safety from not being them. “That could never be me,” they think, “because I am more careful.”

Like most things with negative effects that are disguised as self-protection, it’s rooted in fear. It’s not comfortable to think that maybe you might not be as independent as you think you are. That your plans could fall apart and leave you needing something from someone else. It’s much easier to blame that person than it is to confront the fact that it could be you. Because that’s scary. It’s convenient to avoid scary.

Not quite so convenient when it’s you who needs something.

I’ve seen some people on the socials talk about this issue as one of closeness. That they don’t mind doing things for people, but only if they’re close friends. If it’s someone they don’t know well, being asked for a favor is awkward, makes them pull back from the interaction, and question the individual’s motives. It’s an interesting contrast to the Ben Franklin effect, which a former boss told me about over a decade ago: that when a person does a favor for someone, they tend to like that person more afterward, even if they did not like them much before.

I’ve always found that effect to be real.

So by resisting helping people we don’t know (or like!) because ‘we’re not close enough’ to them… are we actually reducing our chances of becoming closer to more people? It’s entirely possible that the increasing resistance to getting to know people and letting them know us (another thing I’ve observed recently that I won’t get into in great detail here) is tied in with this association of needing help with moral failure.

Having fewer people in our lives and doing fewer things for fewer people, a move away from community and connection, and distorting the concept of responsibility might feel safe and provide some kind of sense of moral superiority, but it’s not sustainable.

Why?

Humans are incentive-driven. Look at how apologies are handled. When a public figure or corporation makes a mistake, it’s generally accepted that if they take responsibility, show empathy, acknowledge the impact, and offer a sincere apology, that will help their reputation. They can learn from the experience and become better as a result. But some reactions are not positive, regardless of how well the apology is constructed. Taking accountability is met with “OK, so you did it, now we’re going to continue to talk about what you did”, followed by continued social ostracism. That type response comes from people who don’t seek accountability or change but continued criticism and exclusion. If that becomes the norm, there’s no incentive for taking responsibility. If taking responsibility and apologizing doesn’t open a path back into better standing, who would do it? It becomes a strategically pointless act of self-criticism.

These types of attitudes help create a culture where it seems almost functionally better to deny, deflect, and fight than it is to admit fault (even though it is NOT better to do this), because being at fault is painted as the primary issue. For accountability to be a functional social mechanism, it must include a pathway for the person to repair the harm and reintegrate, and people almost always need help in doing this. If we then also continue to criticize people who don’t take responsibility, don’t respond well to denials and deflections either, and use fault as a reason to withhold help, there’s no way to ‘win’ if you’re not perfect. And nobody is.

If we continue to meet accountability with continued derision and believe that any circumstance in which the person in it is at fault for being in it means they must handle the consequences alone, we make it less likely that people will take accountability and ask for help. Which makes it seem even more of an unreasonable thing when people do ask for help… It’s a vicious cycle.

I blame technology, somewhat, as it has made our isolation more palatable. We’re more connected digitally than we ever have been, but these close emotional connections are often physically distant. I have several genuine online friendships that play a huge and meaningful part in my life. I wouldn’t want to change them. But these relationships a complement to, not a substitute for, community in our actual local area, and that community is shrinking. Remote work, on-demand delivery, online shopping, streaming services, Uber etc. have made it so easy for us to meet our material needs without any meaningful interaction with others. We could do almost everything entirely alone within the confines of our own homes if we wanted. It makes self-sufficiency feel easy. It makes us forget that our well-being is tied to that of those around us. We forget how to ask for help, and we forget how to give it.

You can’t retreat from community and then wonder where it went.

Advocating for personal insulation above collective resilience creates a dangerously fragile society where one bad event can leave a person stranded by social judgment that insists they deserve it.

“No one owes you anything.”

“Life isn’t fair.”

“Deal with it.”

I don’t think this issue is as broadly prevalent as social media makes it seem, but it’s important to consider the reality of its effects. Compassion doesn’t go viral on social, whereas dismissiveness does. Over time, that public performance can seep into your private identity.

Needing help isn’t a form of failure. Helping is an opportunity to strengthen our social fabric. Again, I don’t mean abandoning boundaries or saying yes to every request. But negotiate limits with grace and kindness and make an effort to distinguish between those who want to take advantage of you and those who simply need a quick favor.

Sometimes we DO need to choose to inconvenience ourselves, in small and manageable ways, for the benefit of others, with the understanding that we, too, will one day need the same.

Think about this next time your knee-jerk reaction is ‘no’ to someone who asks you for a favor, whether its their fault that they need it or not.

I should probably end this now. I have a few emails to send about a driveway for my storage POD…